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MovieMail's Review
Vittorio De Sica's poignant, powerful film sees a luxurious Eden becoming a ghetto for a Jewish family in pre-war Italy. It's a deeply compassionate study, says David Parkinson.
Vittorio De Sica’s career was full of contradictions. A matinee idol in the Fascist ‘white telephone’ era, he became the most popular exponent of postwar neo-realism before directing a string of commedia all’italiana hits in the 1960s.
However, his stock had slipped by the time he optioned Giorgio Bassani’s autobiographical novel about aristocratic Jewish siblings extending hospitality to a Communist engineer and a bourgeois student. It regained his status by winning both the Golden Bear at Berlin and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
In many ways, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini is a neo-realist picture. Like Luchino Visconti, De Sica could take opulent sets and lush colour visuals and still impart a mood of authenticity. This he reinforced by using locations across Ferrara and casting non-professionals alongside his stars.
Thus, this rarely feels like a period drama, and even less like a conscious act of atonement on De Sica’s part for living under a regime that had participated in the Holocaust. Instead, it’s a deeply compassionate study of envy, isolation and repression that focuses less on the persecution of Jews than their own internecine divisions.
The wealthy Finzi-Contini are resented by their neighbours for their aura of superiority. It’s this misguided arrogance that makes them think they can hide behind the walls of their luxurious home and survive the imposition of increasingly pernicious race laws. But, while their garden is initially shown as an alternative to the tennis club from which they’ve been excluded, it eventually becomes a ghetto that can offer them little more than phantom protection. Indeed, everything feels like an Edenic dream until reality cruelly intrudes.
Some feel De Sica sidestepped the issue of national culpability by confining the action to an already enclosed community, but this is actually the source of the story’s poignancy and power.
Brand new transfer and subtitle translation of the film
Interviews with star Lino Capolicchio, screenwriter Ugo Pirro and composer Manuel De Sica
Original Trailer
Comprehensive booklet with new writing on the film by Italian cinema expert Christopher Wagstaff, translations of screenwriter Ugo Pirro and composer Manuel De Sica's comments on the film as well as a contemporary interview with De Sica.
Film Description
An Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 1970, Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Contini is set in the Italian city of Ferrara in the late 1930s, and was adapted from the novel by Giorgio Bassani.
Protected by the walls of their estate, aristocratic Jewish family the Finzi-Continis - brother and sister Alberto (Helmut Berger) and Micol (Dominique Sanda) and their friends, Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) and Bruno (Fabio Testi) - play tennis and enjoy relaxing afternoons. Away from the seclusion and safety of the estate, however, Fascism is on the rise and soon their joyful days will come to an end...
